Take Five With Tom Fenton
5 Attention-Grabbing Announcements at Dell Technologies World 2019
This year at DTW there was such a wide array of news and announcements made, but here are five things that especially caught my eye.
Dell Technologies World (DTW) 2019, held in Las Vegas from April 29-May 2, drew in more than 15,000 attendees from more than 100 countries. I find it hard to imagine that a little over 30 years ago, as Michael Dell was putting computers together in his dorm room at University of Texas, he could have ever imagined that he would one day head one of the largest computer companies in the world that would be capable (and often would, actually) supply a datacenter with all the hardware needed to run the largest of enterprises. This year at DTW there was such a wide array of news and announcements made, but here are five things that especially caught my eye.
TAKE 1
Isilon OneFS. Isilon announced OneFS v8.2, the latest release of the OS that runs the storage nodes over its highly scalable storage system; v8.2 enables Isilon clusters to grow to 252 nodes (their previous limit was 144), thereby allowing the storage of up to 58PB of data. On the hardware side, the company also announced the Isilon H5600, a general scale-out file storage cluster node that uses a mix of SSDs and disk drives to supply up to approximately 800TB of storage to an Isilon cluster.
TAKE 2
Unified Workspace. Combining technology and services from many of the companies under the Dell umbrella, Unified Workspace is a new offering from Dell that simplifies device lifecycle management for IT. By using Unified Workspace, an enterprise can have a device delivered to a user preconfigured and ready to use right out of the box. Furthermore, Unified Workspace will manage the maintenance and security of the device throughout its lifecycle. This is an interesting concept as it will free up an enterprise's IT staff to do more meaningful and productive work.
TAKE 3
VMware and Dell Engineering Synergy. This is not about one particular product, but an overall evident theme; throughout DTW, VMware and Dell really stressed how the unity, cooperation, and synergy of both companies' engineering departments can make for better products.
TAKE 4
Latitude Notebooks. A fair amount of mindshare, and floor space, was dedicated to Dell's updated line of its well-regarded Latitude notebook computers, the entire series of which Dell has shrunk the size and extended the battery life. I'm not sure I would have put this much emphasis on notebooks at DTW, but Dell did, so I will defer to the company on this item making my list.
TAKE 5
Non-Dell Product of the Event. My non-Dell favorite product this year was Intel's Optane SSD DC D4800X drive. This U.2 form factor NVMe SSSD drive, which comes in 375GB, 750GB and 1.5TB capacities, caught my attention; not only does it have Optane technology, but it has dual NVMe interfaces, making this NVMe device truly enterprise-ready because the data contained on it can still be accessed even if one of its interfaces fails. It looks like I'm not the only one impressed with the D4800X, as Dell is putting it in its PowerMax family of storage arrays.
About the Author
Tom Fenton has a wealth of hands-on IT experience gained over the past 30 years in a variety of technologies, with the past 20 years focusing on virtualization and storage. He previously worked as a Technical Marketing Manager for ControlUp. He also previously worked at VMware in Staff and Senior level positions. He has also worked as a Senior Validation Engineer with The Taneja Group, where he headed the Validation Service Lab and was instrumental in starting up its vSphere Virtual Volumes practice. He's on X @vDoppler.